Moralia Secondary Paratext
Of all the theologians portrayed in the Disputa, Gregory the Great has received shortest shrift, despite the prevalent belief that the Dialogist is in fact a portrait of Julius II. Gregory was a prolific writer and proved to be one of the most influential civic and spiritual leaders of Late Antiquity, and like his patristic predecessors, he advocated reading as a spiritual activity. Even before his unanimous election to the papacy in 590, Gregory proved to be a dynamic administrator and diplomat; in his youth, he served as Roman prefect, and as pope he advanced major bureaucratic and ecclesiastical reform of the Church. Regarded as the exemplary scholar and pontiff, Gregory served as a moral guide for later ecumenical generations, and reforming popes turned to his writings in search of legal precedents as they built and revised the canons of Christian law. Above all, he was celebrated in his lifetime and by later critics as an enlightened reader of scripture and an inspired interpreter of the Word, and he imparted a prodigious corpus of dogmatic letters, expositions, and commentaries.
Gregory represented for many of his readers the archetypal symbol of papal authority and the founder of the divine office. For the papacy, he represented a ripe symbol of the pontifical authority, which was easily shaped into the image and policies of his successors. In Raphael’s time, Gregory’s personal effects continued to serve as objects of veneration, the most important of which were his throne and altar table in the monastery of San Gregorio Magno on the Caelian Hill. It is often noted that Raphael modeled Gregory’s marble seat in the Disputa after these patristic relics, and even in preparatory drawings for the Disputa, Raphael paid considerable attention to the architecture of Gregory’s holy cathedra, importing its protome base and the acanthus scrolls of its armrests.
Further Reading
Hartt, Frederick. “Pagnini, Vigerio, and the Sistine Ceiling: A Reply.” Art Bulletin 23 (1951): 271-272.
Mews, Constant J. and Claire Renkin. “The Legacy of Gregory the Great in the Latin West.” In Companion to Gregory the Great, eds. Neil Bronwen and Matthew Dal Santo, 315-339. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Wasselynck, René. “Présence de s. Grégoire le grand dans les recueils canoniques (X-XII).” Mélanges de science religieuse 22 (1965): 205-219.
Wingfield, Kim Butler. “Networks of Knowledge: Inventing Theology in the Stanza della Segnatura.” Studies in Iconography 38 (2017): 174-221.